Wednesday, October 01, 2008

I Figured Out Internet People

I wonder, occasionally, why people complain that the Wii has nothing good coming out in the coming months, and how they can overlook the obvious fact that all of the big guns have been fired, and most of them are pretty good games. Super Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, all that other crap that other people care about -- it's here! It's reality! If you don't own these games, take the money that you were planning to spend on a game in 2010 and use it to buy something that's out right now! If you do own these games, play them! What the hell is wrong with you!

Ah! But then I noticed something. The only people who are complaining about this are Internet people. And Internet people don't enjoy video games so much as they enjoy arguing about video games. They love nothing more than to make up stories about how games like Lair and Halo 3 and Metroid Prime 3 will actually physically murder everyone who disagrees with them. How the heretics will wail and gnash their teeth and fall into the fires of hell. It's less a matter of discussing a hobby and more a holy war, with multiple factions puffing up the importance of their respective unreleased software gods.

And the nice thing about unreleased games is that they can be argued in these terms because they are unknown quantities. No one's talking about Lair or Halo 3 or Metroid Prime 3 anymore because their successes and failures are common knowledge. The fanboys have not yet invested their ego into a single piece of software that has succeeded in destroying the opposition like the omnipotent gods they are imagined to be. (Conversely, the thing they most despise has had a huge impact on this industry they love to bitch about, leading to dark prophesies about the fate of Nintendo, should they choose to continue to ignore their nerdcore base.)

So the problem is that the nerds have nothing to look forward to. There are no mysterious gods for them to call upon in their pointless Internet fights, and so they feel that Nintendo has abandoned them. They have no appreciation for the carrots they have, only for the ones that are dangling out of reach.